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StartEngine’s $30M Surge — Own a Piece Before June 26

Private markets are having a moment, thanks to companies like StartEngine.

The leading alternative investing platform is helping everyday investors like you access deals once reserved for VCs and insiders, including exposure to private market titans like OpenAI, Databricks, and Perplexity.¹

How’s it going? In Q1 2025, StartEngine pulled off $30M in revenue, its biggest quarter ever (based on unaudited financials).²

But StartEngine isn’t just a middleman. The company earns 20% carried interest on select pre-IPO offerings, unlocking value for shareholders when these deals succeed.³

How can you tap into this diversification play? By investing in StartEngine.

StartEngine has crowdfunded $85M+ to date, and you can join 45K+ shareholders before the company’s current round closes on June 26.

Invest in StartEngine

_{Reg A+ via StartEngine Crowdfunding, Inc. No BD/intermediary involved. Investment is speculative, illiquid & high risk. See OC and Risks on page.}

We know—we’re biased. But we’re also not wrong.

There’s a massive shift happening right under our noses. LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are changing how customers discover and evaluate companies. Yet most teams are still running the same tired playbook—optimize the landing page, tweak the paid search copy, double down on ad spend.

The reality? That money isn’t doing what it used to.

We’re in a post-Google world now. When potential buyers want to understand a market or vet a vendor, they’re not sifting through search results. They’re asking AI assistants for answers—and those assistants aren’t looking at your homepage.

They’re scanning trade publications, industry reports, expert commentary, analyst insights, and media coverage. 

They’re surfacing companies whose executives are consistently cited as credible sources, not the ones with the highest CPM.

If your leadership team isn’t showing up in those places, you’re already behind.

Think about it this way: One exec quote in an authoritative industry outlet today becomes part of the next version of every major AI model’s training data. That insight—delivered once—gets resurfaced in thousands of queries over time. It doesn’t expire. It compounds.

Meanwhile, the next paid campaign you launch will need to be refreshed in a month. That audience will vanish the second the budget runs dry. And the CPC? Still going up.

It’s not that performance marketing is useless. It’s just losing its dominance. It’s no longer the best way to generate long-term discovery or trust.

This is where PR comes in.

What used to be seen as a brand-building tool is now a visibility engine. It's how companies earn presence in the places AI is paying attention to. Not through manipulation—but through meaningful participation.

• That means having your CEO build actual relationships with journalists. 

• It means getting your execs quoted in industry stories, contributing insight to timely conversations, and showing up with a perspective that signals credibility—not just availability.

PR isn’t just about the splashy feature anymore. It’s about becoming the consistent voice that’s hard to ignore—and easy for AI to resurface when it’s asked, “Who are the key players in this space?”

In practical terms, here’s what that looks like inside companies that are getting this right:

• Executives are carving out time to talk with journalists—not just when they launch something, but when they have something to say.

• Leadership teams are writing or co-authoring bylines that express a clear POV, not just restating what’s already been said.

• Comms is no longer siloed inside a junior role—it’s tied to growth, credibility, and inbound demand.

And no, this isn’t a “three years from now” prediction. This is already happening.

When I ask Siri to look something up now, she offers to use ChatGPT. And I say yes—almost every time. So do your customers. So do investors. So do analysts. This shift is no longer theoretical. It’s active.

The companies that win in this environment are the ones building media muscle. They’re showing up not just in conversations—but in the underlying signals that shape those conversations.

They’re doing the work to earn visibility, not buy it. And it’s paying off.

So ask yourself: When someone types a question about your market into ChatGPT… will your name come up?

If not, it’s time to stop treating PR like a nice-to-have. 

It’s your next growth engine.

📱 New in non-traditional media

Tracking the newsletters, podcasts, and creators reshaping media influence.

📰 In the news

• 📌 Reddit Sues Anthropic Over Unauthorized Data Use

  Reddit has filed a lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court, accusing Anthropic—the maker of the Claude chatbot—of scraping Reddit content over 100,000 times since July 2024 without permission. The case highlights rising tensions over how generative AI companies source training data, and could reset the legal landscape around content ownership on the internet.
  

• 🗞️ Mansueto Ventures Lays Off 7% at Inc. & Fast Company

  Mansueto Ventures—the parent company behind Inc. and Fast Company—has laid off approximately 13 staffers, or 7% of its workforce. Among those affected are senior editorial positions spanning both publications. The cuts reflect a wider media contraction and raise concerns about how business-focused titles will maintain depth and editorial quality during an era increasingly shaped by AI, automation, and revenue pressures.
  

• 📉  Business Insider Layoffs Spark Backlash

  Last week Business Insider announced major layoffs affecting 21 percent of its staff. The layoffs sparked a wave of backlash on LinkedIn, where former employees voiced outrage over the company's embrace of AI-generated content to supplement newsroom output. Many criticized the move as short-sighted and dehumanizing, calling out leadership for prioritizing automation over journalistic integrity—especially after cutting roles across editorial teams.
  

• 💾 TechCrunch Shutters UK Edition, Loses Mike Butcher & Kyle Wiggers

  TechCrunch has shut down its European operations and parted ways with Mike Butcher—its founding editor-at-large—confirmed to be leaving after nearly 18 years. Kyle Wiggers quickly followed suit. The move follows private equity firm Regent’s acquisition and signals a major strategic shift away from international coverage. The closure has sparked concern across the tech journalism community about the weakening of independent regional reporting. Butcher teased an upcoming move on LinkedIn.

🎤 Spotlight on New(ish) Creators

Big media is getting in on the newsletter action.

📧 HBR Executive

• Curated by: Harvard Business Review editors and guest experts

• Focus: A new suite of deep-dive newsletter subscriptions across topics like leadership, innovation, strategy, and personal productivity

• Why Subscribe: HBR is finally putting paywalled structure behind its newsletter content—ideal for execs who want smarter inbox content, minus the LinkedIn hustle.

📧 Like & Subscribe

• Curated by: The Ankler Media team

• Focus:  The business and power dynamics of the creator economy

• Why Subscribe: Cuts through hype around creators, influencers, and platform economics—with a Hollywood-adjacent lens and a sharp subscription model ($129/year = serious intent)

📧 Tech Memo

• Curated by: Alistair Barr, former Bloomberg and WSJ tech reporter, now at Business Insider

• Focus: Insider stories from big tech companies—tools, docs, and moves that rarely make headlines

• Why Subscribe: Offers rare peeks into the internal mechanics of major tech firms, straight from a veteran journalist with sources across Silicon Valley

⭐️ Favorite story of the week:

• “Why Microsoft Has Created Its Own Print Magazine” - The Verge
  
  Microsoft just soft-launched its own print magazine—yes, print—called Signal. And the first feature is an emotional, weirdly beautiful tribute to… Notepad. As in, the no-frills text app that comes free with Windows and hasn’t changed much since the '90s.

  In a digital world obsessed with AI, video, and viral content, Microsoft launching a physical magazine is already unexpected. But what really caught people off guard was the tone. The piece isn’t promotional. It’s poetic. Nostalgic. Almost meditative. It treats Notepad like a cultural artifact—something humble, enduring, and deeply human in an era of tech overload.

  And that’s what makes it such a bold move: instead of chasing the algorithm, Microsoft went analog—and emotional. In a media landscape dominated by speed and scale, they led with slowness and soul. And weirdly, that might be the most future-facing strategy of all.

⚡️ [Under Embargo] -  The Colab Expands

We’re building something big.

Next week, we’ll be launching the live waitlist for The Colab Academy, where you’ll get early access to weekly insights, expert interviews, and community features designed to sharpen your comms strategy in a world shaped by AI and earned authority.

We’ll also be unveiling our new FullStack PR framework—a fresh approach to communications that blends executive-led storytelling, targeted media relations, and AI-optimized visibility. It’s a smarter way to build relevance, not just reach.

More details coming soon. Keep an eye on your inbox. 👀

Don’t want to wait? Start creating your AI awareness strategy today.  Say hello. 

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